Has anyone made a zombie game where you actually clear/retake an infested city? Lots of games have you raid a city to build a base somewhere else, (7D2D, unturned, now Vein, etc.) or just do things in an infested city (Dying Light, RE, etc.) sometimes culminating in some sort of big climax that results in or implies the end of the zombie times, or maybe you just leave, but are there any that have that element of progression where you slowly take more of the map and the zombies aren’t just randomly spawned in a radius around the player regardless of how many you knock down? The closest I have ever found was an old flash game from when those were a thing, based around worker placement and resource management.
Can be done in Project Zomboid.
It’s not the goal or anything; it’s a hardcore sandbox survival game where you are expected to die. But you can set it up so the zombies do not respawn making a set limit to them, and kill every single one in a city, or even the entire map.
With mods you can even make it so that you can eventually have a return to normalcy.
Adding on to this, you can still have zombies respawn, so long as you barricade the area the game shouldn’t spawn zombies inside.
I’ve not taken back a town or anything, but on one of my longer runs with respawns off you can clear out a pretty big area over time. It slowly goes from a zombie game to a life sim.